I was a little perturbed today having witnessed some really poor salesmanship at a local Orlando computer shop I stopped into to try and find a special type of USB cable (another story).

While I was in the shop, the owner (I assume) began helping a walk-in client who came in with a laptop asking about Windows 7 and if he could upgrade it.

The salesman/owner turned over the laptop and saw an OEM Vista Home Premium sticker, and said ‘yes you can upgrade it, but we don’t recommend it’ and went on to give the guy some techno-babble about the hard drive not working correctly when you ‘try’ to do an upgrade’

THEN he went on to say he could sell him an OEM copy of Windows 7, complete with a CD he could take home for $200, and they could do the install for $50.

The obviously non-technical customer asked if Windows 7 came with Word, and to my utter disbelief, the sales-owner said ‘yes’! About 5 seconds later, he somewhat correctly himself saying it comes with Word-pad – making a distinctive pause between ‘word’ and ‘pad’. “But we also can install OpenOffice for you.” More blank looks.

As I was browsing around the store waiting to see if his tech could find the cable I was looking for, I also saw 4 copies of the Office 2007 OEM disk kit in the counter display case, for anyone to come in a buy.

So this company misrepresents Microsoft products, blatantly selling OEM product completely against Microsoft’s licensing requirements, AND he’s completely misleading this customer.

Turns out they didn’t have the cable, and I didn’t have the opportunity to talk to the customer as the owner-sale guy was glued to his side. I did sit in the car for a few minute in the parking lot hoping the customer might clue-in and leave and I would have talked to him outside (and tell him to go buy the Windows 7 upgrade from a reputable store and just do it himself).

Microsoft needs to put the hammer down on this type of reseller. It hurts all of us.

The really scary part I saw on their window as I drove away is their ‘business’ service offering. They ‘take care’ of you. Right.

The picture in my blog banner is the family farm in Saskatchewan where I spent many summers running around keeping everyone else occupied. It’s where I learned to drive when I was 9 or so (just about took out a building – thanks Grandpa), and learned many a life lesson from my uncles, aunts, cousins and Grandma (“that fence could use some painting”).

Just to the right of where the blog picture ends is where my Uncle Lynn lives – he built his own house there, and I actually helped shingle his garage that summer some 30-odd years ago (coincidentally, he just had the shingles re-done).

Anyway, Uncle Lynn’s a bit of a computer geek – meaning to say he loves computers – even though he lives off of dial-up (the options are pretty limited in SE Saskatchewan, though I’ll bet he’ll break at some point and get a satellite system installed).

So of course the Windows 7 questions started coming, and last week I spent some time figuring out how and where to get the Family Pack (see my earlier post). Turns out he made a trip to the States, and picked up a copy in Minot, ND for something under $150 US.

Then he took it home, upgraded his Vista laptop, and then spent a few hours copying all his data off his XP workstation in anticipation of it’s ‘upgrade’.

It turns out his workstation has a data drive that the upgrade process walked him through copying all his files and settings to, performed the ‘7’ install, and copied the files and data back to the new install.

Without a hitch.

My Uncle was so pleased with himself, he picked up the phone to tell me all about it last night, and I was only too happy to listen. It’s really nice to get those relative-wants-to-talk-about-computers calls when it’s all about how they got it done without any outside assistance.

IMO, the XP to 7 upgrade process is probably the biggest hurdle Microsoft faces in getting people to ‘upgrade’, and this experience is proof-positive that they’ve done a good job of it.

Certainly better than I expected. Congrats Microsoft. Now Uncle Lynn needs to keep the phone line occupied for a few hours to download the updates

Are you a college/university student in Canada?

Check this deal out – $40 for Windows 7 Pro (upgrade) and $64 for Office 2007 Ultimate!

(click the ‘additional products’ link to see the Win7 price).

So eat KD for an extra week – this offer is too good to pass up (even if OpenOffice is ‘free’).

http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-ca/default.aspx

Wow – tough time finding this thing to recommend to family…until I had the SKU to Google with.

www.microsoft.ca has a ‘buy now’ link, that throws you over to their U.S. online store, except they don’t ship to Canada. So why is there a ‘buy now’ link?

Googling/Binging brought no more joy.

Called Microsoft Canada – disconnected after hearing one of their Indian call centre folks answer and hang up without realizing I was on the other end.

Called Microsoft Canada Parts – who told me there is no Canadian online store, and couldn’t tell me anything more.

Called the main MS Canada line back and got to speak with Tom – great guy, and helped me find it, and gave me the Cdn SKU (GFC-00235).

So Bestbuy.ca has it – for $40 more than the MSRP (huh?). Sorry Best Buy – I’m not linking to you!

Searched for GFC-00235 and found NCIX.com also has it (no stock yet), but actually for the $199 price.

It’s a great deal, Canada – 3 Home Premium licenses for the price of 1.

Go get it – you won’t be disappointed (though it looks like you’ll have to wait for a back-order).

BEST DEAL: Costco.ca (select the drop down box)

NCIX.com

Agile Electronics

Shark Systems

Cendirect.com

tigerdirect.ca

Aastra has released ‘conversion firmware’ to turn ResponsePoint phones into standard SIP so you can attach them to other IP-PBX’s. Like Zultys, for example.

Another nail in the RP coffin.

http://www.aastratelecom.com/cps/rde/xchg/03/hs.xsl/28250.htm

Used this for the first time today, and ran into a small snag.

When doing a P2V migration with this utility, the image needs to have the proper IDE drivers to play nice with Hyper-V, otherwise you end up with a BSOD and a 0×0000007B STOP error.

The fix is to follow the advice of THIS POST on the SysInternals forums, which describes the steps to take per THIS Microsoft KB article.

So I followed the steps (relatively easy), ran the utility again, and Hyper-V worked like a charm. Removed a couple of things (like NVidia chipset and PCI audio drivers), but other than that it worked flawlessly.

Now I’ve got an XP Pro VM running on the same host as my SBS 2008 and 2003 member servers, and it runs better than any other machine I’ve got (including Win7 Ultimate), mainly because I run network apps reliant on wire speeds, and being local to the same host, the XP VM is running 10GigE.

I like.

Great article/review on the No Jitter blog today and I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been working with Zultys since 2004, and with other phone systems since 1995, and I’m constantly impressed by all the things Zultys does in a 2U box.

If you’re in the market for a new phone system, Zultys is a great choice.

As the SBS Diva blogged yesterday, there’s a nasty possible attack out there this week. One of my clients was alert enough to ask us if we had sent it.

Don’t click links in email folks!

Utility to do physical to virtual migrations…

http://snipurl.com/disk2vhd

So my Rogers Business Internet service went down sometime arount 1 – 1:30 pm today, and calling Rogers support resulted in a “yes there’s an issue, and it will be back up in 3-1/2 hours. That was approximately 7 hours ago.

I called back a couple hours later and was told – about another hour, and I also inquired as to what the issue was. Cut fibre connection, just south of Kanata (near Richmond on Fallowfield Rd.).

Really not great Rogers. 1 point of failure – I understand something like 97 nodes are out in Ottawa. ONE fibre line? Ever heard of ‘redundancy’?

Talk about putting your eggs in one basket.

When’s the next price hike? Gotta keep that share price going up, right?